Innovative new technology has been used to successfully transmit data across the national grid, marking an important step towards a more efficient ‘smart grid’ and potentially changing the way we approach to the need to cope with energy demands.
The new technology means that, dependent of levels of demand and supply, data can be sent across the grid, into houses to reach appliances, the usage of which can then be altered accordingly. For example, if demand is particularly high, then a signal can be transmitted that could travel through the mains and very slightly reduce the temperature of thousands of electric water heaters, freeing up power to be used elsewhere across the country.
The same can work the other way round – during periods where supply may be too high, extra power can be distributed among various appliances to return a balance – this particular feature will importantly allow for “optimum use of intermittent renewable energy, an important feature given the fast-rising proportion of green energy on the grid”, as the Guardian reports.
This new development forms part of a wider project geared towards changing the way we approach our energy supply, moving towards a less centralised smart grid. That is, rather than simply adding more large power stations to the grid in order to create more supply to cope with increasing demand, we can make smarter and more efficient use of the supply we do have, as well as connecting several, smaller generators to the grid.
This has the added benefit of evenly distributing responsibility for our energy supply, meaning that a single failure would have far less severe an impact.
The CEO of Reactive Technologies, the company behind this first successful data transmission, explains: “What is better? Building a Hinkley, which if it goes down you have lost 7% of the national electricity generation, or building up capacity from many hundreds of thousands of smaller devices around the UK? It needs quite a cultural shift: smaller is better, distributed is better.”
The basic idea behind what Reactive Technologies have done is not new – on a more local level, information is sent through the grid’s cable networks in order to control street lamps, for example.
However, the nature of the physical network of wires meant that sending data through the grid on a nationwide level was previously thought more or less impossible. What Reactive Technologies have done is alter the way in which the data itself is transmitted, making use of existing frequencies that do travel through the cables and through substations. They successfully tested their ideas by setting up a series of large resistors designed to send out data, and a series of ‘listening points’ distributed around the country, designed to receive the data.
National Grid’s Cordi O’Hara emphasised the importance of this new breakthrough: “We are keen to support innovative products like this one that can bring a real benefit for customers. It represents another step forward in the development of the smart grid technologies that are going to play an increasingly important role in the energy systems of the future.”
The ultimate aim of decentralising energy generation and working on a fully functioning ‘smart grid’ fits with findings recently reported by the World Energy Council, who believe that the kind of efficiencies that such technology leads to, will ultimately work toward reducing per capita energy demand, which they predict will peak before 2030.
